There is a small trace of this in Armed With Madness when Philip, the husband of Scylla’s friend in London, is reported in his wife’s thoughts as having “gone out to meet a Jew whose favour they were nursing”; nursing no doubt in the interests of a deal of some kind. Philip, stupidly middle class, smug in his petty moralism, is aggressively hostile to the Taverners and their lifestyle and “The Jew” appears, as it were, as the edge of that hostility, adding briefly to Butts’s presentation of the forces antagonistic to her values, though here the formulation belongs to the wife and may be read as contained within the terms of the presentation of her. More generally, however, those values as expressed in the conception of the sacred land and given through the Grail story can easily come to seem to have precisely as a condition of their existence some negative outside force against which they can be defended, against which sanctity can be defined. In Armed With Madness we have the vulgar tourist masses and the philistine middle classes (figured by Philip and by Picus’s father); in Death of Felicity Taverner, the nihilistic Jew, as Butts collapses social into racial criticism and the novel becomes flatly conventional in its plot, its ideas, its anti-semitism (this from a writer capable in a review of Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology of writing with some thought on “race-prejudice”).
The strength of Armed With Madness is its uncertainty. There is little plot, no neat ending, no ideologically forced resolution. Its enclosed country-house drama of dis-ease, that the Grail story underlies and informs with a sense of what has been lost, peters out in griefs and wounds and doubts and fragmentations. The adventure can be seen as a “parody of a mystery”, getting nowhere since there is nowhere to be got (“‘Then we get nowhere.’ ‘Nowhere’”); it is “complicated, violent, inconclusive”. The dispersal of the characters after the first Dorset part of the novel is an indication of this. The novel abandons the sequence of numbered chapters and breaks off into a series of short sections with separate headings that shift disconnectedly from character to character (this can be seen, less sharply, earlier in the novel, which, in modernist style, shifts between different centres of consciousness, but there within the narration of a common story). Scylla in London confronts the pettiness of social conventions; Felix home-sick in Paris carries his inferiority complex from bar to bar; Picus prostrates himself weeping on his mother’s grave; Clarence cannot find escape from madness; Ross paints. The return of the novel’s focus to Dorset continues the disintegration, violently expressed in Clarence’s crazed assault on Scylla. As Carston leaves, Felix appears with Boris, the new find, and the novel ends, inconclusively indeed, on a memory from the latter’s childhood, a fragment of a past as though tacked on, another country-house, another wood, the nostalgia of loss.
